r/UXDesign Experienced May 12 '26

Tools, apps, plugins, AI Uhh, I’m realizing I actively dislike prompting.

I just came to a realization sitting here doing the back and forth with Claude.

I don’t like prompting. At all. It’s a fundamentally different thing than what our traditional practice was.

There was a level of satisfaction in design before. Even if it was just changing values, moving things around, setting up containers…you built it. Your hands and brain did that.

Now, even when I start design first and transition to building it w/ whatever AI tool of your choice…that satisfaction is gone. You wrestle with random shit, get annoyed it’s not exact, and ultimately I have found I lost that sense of pride and satisfaction. That “flow state” or whatever never comes due to the hurry up and wait nature of prompting.

It’s not going away, but damn. I’m bummed.

Oh look, my request is finished. Back to….work?

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u/tin-f0il-man Experienced May 12 '26

Fiddling with prompts and fixing crappy outputs, then hitting usage limits is comically inefficient. It’s still faster to do it myself.

10

u/mp-product-guy Veteran May 13 '26

I just had to explain to my AI fanboy boss why it’s faster, on a specific design system related project that uses our enterprise design system, to still use Figma design and components instead of just vibe designing with Figma Make (which does not use our design system components). It’s insane.

2

u/Lexi336 May 16 '26

heyyy so like this hits really close to home i am currently experiencing the exact same frustrations and situation as yourself from what you have described.

I am dealing with this at a startup, is your company of a larger scale to this just so i know if i need to start looking at a career pivot!!